distribution

Years ago, producers of original web series would compare their projects to short films. The internet made short films irrelevant, they’d say, because you could build an audience yourself, rather than wait for film festivals and distributors to validate your story. Besides, television production was expanding on cable, while movie theaters were clogged with blockbusters. [...]

You’ve probably never heard of “F to 7th.” A spin-off of “The Slope,” a Vimeo-based series about “homophobic lesbians,” “F to 7th” is a New York indie TV show from Ingrid Jungermann, who financed the recently-concluded second season with a Spike Lee production grant from New York University (where she received her MFA). To me “F to 7th” is one of [...]

Festivals can create new markets. Sundance ignited the independent film boom in the 1990s after a few of its selections did well at the box office and major studios started picking them up for distribution. Today, while indie filmmakers are struggling to find financing, television is ascendant, with filmmakers from Andrew Haigh, Jill Soloway, Jane [...]

How do we value television? It depends who you ask. Ask advertisers, and they’ll talk CPMs and ROI. Ask network executives, they’ll talk ratings. Ask fans, they’ll rave about their favorite shows or genres. Ask producers, they’ll assess the craft of storytelling. What connects these stakeholders? Over the past year I’ve come to think distribution is [...]

Originally posted on Tubefilter. The New York Television Festival‘s annual Digital Day brought together network executives, creators and marketers to take about the state of the industry and offer advice to new entrants. What did aspiring creators learn? Opportunities for distribution are growing, but success only comes to the lucky and innovative. The good news [...]

Originally posted on Tubefilter. If you’re an indie TV creator, you should know about the New York Television Festival. There are a lot of festivals for independent television, most of them for web series like LAWeb Fest, ITV Fest, and Holly Web Fest. But producers and executives widely consider NYTVF the best in quality. That reputation probably stems from the [...]

Originally published in Flow TV journal. Hold your mouse over footnotes (#) for more information. The Avengers, franchise of franchises, has invaded television. Last year in late July Deadline reported Marvel was in talks with ABC Studios about an Avengers TV show, a “kernel of an idea.” One month later ABC ordered a pilot. Marvel [...]

I’ve been writing about web video since 2009. I’m part of a tiny group of writers who have sustained interest in web television over the years, taking time to interview producers and write about their shows. (Liz Shannon Miller, one such critic, recently compiled a list of sites/publications that do it consistently). Televisual has [...]

It looks like the new television is here: a flexible, open industry more responsive to consumers and producers. Henry Jenkins’ textual poachers have become textual producers. Twenty years ago, audiences struggled to get power in production. Fans orchestrated large, coordinated campaigns to revive shows like Beauty and the Beast. Soon media companies started folding viewers into [...]

BLACK&SEXYTV is an independent video network on YouTube. An outgrowth of Dennis Dortch’s 2008 feature A Good Day to Be Black and Sexy, it has released five episodic series, including The Number, RoomieLoverFriends, That Guy, Hello Cupid, and The Couple, for which the network successfully crowdsourced a spin-off. It has been featured in Ebony, Clutch, Shadow and Act and Indiewire, [...]